Don’t Worry Darling
Don't Worry Darling is basically Stepford Wives meets The Matrix with aspects of The Truman Show thrown in, and a sprinkle of the distorted nightmares from Vanilla Sky. Based on the artistic visions of the aforementioned films one would expect to experience a boundary pushing psychological thriller with depth that poses thought provoking questions on society today. Instead, the movie rests in the familiarity and the stereotypical images of the 1950's.
Alice (Florence Pugh) and her husband Jack (Harry Styles) are living the American dream in the idealistic utopian town called Victory. Jack has uprooted their lives to work for the Victory Corporation. Every morning he drives off to work with the other resident’s husbands, while the wives clean, shop, socialize, and cook dinner. But when one of Alice's closest friends, Margaret, (KiKi Layne), has a psychological breakdown and attempts suicide, massive cover ups emerge, that forces Alice to start questioning the true motives behind the Victory Corporation, risking everything.
The creator of Victory, Frank (Chris Pine), is regularly giving speeches on the radio every morning and sometimes at gatherings promoting a new community in which chaos is controlled within the confines of conservative values, and sexism. In order for Frank to be a more complex intriguing character we needed to see glimmers of those interactions where the dialogue actually goes somewhere substantial. Due to that lack of character development on Frank I didn’t have any feelings toward him necessarily or really care about his character at all.
Ultimately the film dragged repeating imagery and sound design of chaotic breathing which is very heavy handed throughout. Due to there being no real complex tension among characters and paranoia visions the breathing felt almost too separate from the piece, despite it psychologically connecting to the film. It didn’t add enough value to the scenes for it to be there the whole time. A unique score perhaps sparsely dispersed throughout the film would have been better. Like how David Lynch utilizes sound design in Lost Highway where it comes in and fades out eerily. Or even how sound design was done in Irreversible. It could have been smoother and more effective emotionally.
Florence Pugh delivers and carries the film with what she was given. However, the safe script didn’t provide her enough opportunities to go even deeper than she could have. I have never seen Harry Styles in an acting role before. For being a singer, he exceeded my expectations, and I look forward to seeing him in his next role that will be released to theaters in late October. Due to this being about incel culture, Harry’s interpretation of Jack’s transformation is overall fine. But, we needed someone like Shia LaBeouf to take it even further to really get to the raw truth of it all, and make it feel chaotic.
Based on where the film does end up, the falling action after the climax is weak and unsatisfying as a whole. Parts of it do work, but everything for Alice is tied up neatly in a bow after such a horrific experience. The ending was such a missed opportunity to make any powerful statement on sexism, misogyny, incel culture, or gender roles.
Don’t Worry Darling is currently playing in theaters.